The Qualities of a Worldview

After a visit to the local planetarium, a little boy says to his dad, “wow, I feel so small now.” Perhaps you yourself have felt this way on occasion; after watching a documentary on the solar system, after attending a concert along with thousands of other people, after walking the two miles to the nearest gas station because you misjudged how long you could drive with the gas light on. You’ve experienced a feeling of smallness in the face of everyone else, the world, the cosmos. That feeling arises from a kind of size comparison; the proportion between myself and everything else. Have you ever heard the saying “feeling on top of the world”? There’s a comparison in that saying too; a proportion, although the resulting feeling might be the opposite of what the little boy described.

To feel big or small in the face of the other is not only a fleeting emotion. Bigness or smallness could also be a general quality of one’s worldview; one’s world-perspective. For an infinite number of possible reasons, a person may perceive himself as big in the face of the small world, or small in the face of a big world. The subject of this worldview quality is the self. The underlying question is “I feel myself to be ___”. It’s important to realize that we’re not using the word proportion to say anything about the size of the other, except in relation to the self. If I say I feel small in the face of the world, it could only be because I view the world as very big, or it could simply be that I myself feel very small, smaller even than the world. Either way, it’s myself I’m describing, albeit in relation to the other.

Here we’re looking at the other side of the previous comparison. With proportion we looked at the relative size of the self, with magnitude we’re looking at the perceived size of the other. Magnitude is a “disinterested” quality in the sense that it doesn’t care about the self; it’s a simple judgment of the magnitude, the size, of everything else. Magnitude and proportion go hand-in-hand, however. It’s difficult to make a judgment about the size of the world without simultaneously making a judgment about its size compared to me.

Of course, our answers to questions about both these qualities is necessarily constrained to how we understand bigness and smallness. It has been argued that a judgment about size is always a comparison; that size is necessarily a relational concept. The ensuing complexity and divergence of size judgements is irrelevant though. We’re not attempting to influence or define the individual’s unique view of the world, we only want to describe it.